The present invention generally relates to flight planning, and more particularly to methods and apparatus for assembling a flight plan.
Flight planning systems are currently in wide scale use for commuter, long range, wide body jet airlines, and other types of aircraft. Flight planning systems have continued to advance in sophistication and have also continued to provide increasingly higher levels of information density that enable the visual presentation of a greater amount of data to the operator and/or user. These advancements in sophistication and the increasingly higher levels of information density provide the visual display of data that can be readily assimilated by an operator and/or user and also provides a reduction in unnecessary information to ease the task of perceiving and understanding data of interest for flight plan assembly tasks.
Flight plan assembly or flight planning includes, but is not limited to, a review of a lateral map on a display, such as a Multi-Function Display (MFD), and assembly of multiple flight routes to form the flight plan. The flight plan can be automatically assembled from a database having a predefined route/city pair or manually assembled by an operator and/or user. The resulting flight plan is generally composed of active and alternate flight plans specified with one or more waypoints, which are uniquely identified latitude and longitude points. The waypoints are assembled to create a route of flight that comprises departures, enroutes, arrivals, and approaches, for example.
A significant amount of flexibility is generally provided for generating an initial flight plan and for modifying the waypoints of an existing flight plan. For example, an operator can generally insert a waypoint, delete a waypoint, and overfly a waypoint. In addition, departure/arrival procedures, airway intersections, offsets, and holding patterns can be inserted into a flight plan. However, this tends to produce multiple waypoints at a single location on the lateral map with a single set of data associated with each of the waypoints displayed for review by the operator and/or user. Therefore, it is desirable to visually present the waypoints in a manner that provides proper cognitive mapping between the operator and/or user and also preferably reduces the effort that the operator and/or user needs to make to distinguish between the multiple waypoints at the single location on the lateral map.
In view of the foregoing, it should be appreciated that it would be desirable to provide methods and apparatus for assembling a flight plan that present the waypoints in a manner that provides proper cognitive mapping between the operator and/or user and also preferably reduces the effort that the operator and/or user needs to make to distinguish between the multiple waypoints at the single location on the lateral map. Furthermore, additional desirable features will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art from the foregoing background of the invention and following summary, brief description of the drawings, detailed description of the drawings, and appended claims.
In accordance with the teachings of the present invention, methods and apparatus are provided for assembling a flight plan. The apparatus has a memory configured to store data associated with waypoints that can be used in the flight plan and a processor coupled to the memory, which is configured to access the memory and retrieve data associated with a first waypoint and data associated with a second waypoint. The first waypoint corresponding to a first leg of the flight plan and the second waypoint corresponding to a second leg of the flight plan. In addition, the apparatus has a display coupled to the processor. The display is configured to produce a visual representation of the flight plan with a single waypoint designation at a single location for the first waypoint and the second waypoint using the data retrieved by the processor. The display is also configured to produce a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the single waypoint designation at the single location with a first leg identifier for the first leg and a second leg identifier other than first leg identifier for the second leg.
The method includes the steps of storing data in a memory that is associated with waypoints for planning of a flight plan, retrieving the data from the memory that is associated with a first waypoint and a second waypoint of the waypoints. The first waypoint corresponding to a first leg of the flight plan and the second waypoint corresponding to a second leg of the flight plan. In addition, the method includes generating a visual representation of the flight plan with a single waypoint designation at a single location for the first waypoint and the second waypoint using the data retrieved from the memory and generating a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the single waypoint designation at the single location with a first leg identifier for the first leg and a second leg identifier other than the first leg identifier for the second leg.